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What about the Boyos?

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by Anna Raccoon on August 4, 2015

Amnesty International is as right-on, bleeding heart, liberal as it comes. Since 1961, when it was launched hand-in-glove with the caring souls at the Guardian, it has redefined colonialism by imposing the views of the Islington crowd on populations as diverse as Eritrea and China. ‘Global Equality’ is its watchword, by which it means ‘my views are superior to your views’ and thus you must adopt my views…

It has considered its views superior to those of the Christian church – ‘you will allow homosexuals to marry’; democratic governments; health organisations; you name it, there are few social groups that Amnesty doesn’t consider it has a mandate to force change upon. Whether you consider that the organisation does ‘good work’ and should be supported rather depends on whether you believe that ‘your views’ are morally superior to those of which ever (generally) brown skinned section of the global family Amnesty has turned its attention to.

As you may imagine, this has caused some consternation amongst social justice warriors who wish to redefine victimhood from the safety of their anonymous keyboards.

Show them a foul mouthed harridan, perfectly capable of reducing an entire posse of drunken sailors into gibbering wrecks, built like Godzilla, endowed with all the charm of Esmerelda, happily pounding her beat and stashing fifty pound notes into her retirement fund – and they will still see a frail waif who doesn’t realise that the man she conned into paying her fare to Belfast was actually ‘trafficking’ her across the border, that violence can only ever be inflicted on women – and should she beat up a non-paying customer that doesn’t count as violence merely a spirited attempt to escape the misery of her situation.

(Please don’t imagine that I think all Irish prostitutes are foul mouthed harridans – I know perfectly well they are not – ‘some of my best friends’ etc., etc. I merely wish to illustrate that no matter how unlikely a victim figure they may cut, the moral guardians will still see them as helpless creatures, so long as they are female).

‘Women are victims by virtue of being women’. That is the message pounded out relentlessly by the army of organisations setting themselves up to ‘rescue’ helpless women who stupidly imagine that they have chosen their way of life out of their own free will.

There is big money in rescuing victims. Thus they are not interested in merely rescuing those who are under-age, those who have been coerced, those who have been trafficked by unscrupulous gangsters – they want to rescue every women from a life of sexual slavery. The best way to do that is to criminalise paid sexual activity, that way the courts will obligingly turn out a regular diet of new clients, week in, week out. The oldest profession will not grind to a halt; those who think they are acting out of their own free will, will go on practising their craft, so you will never run out of people for whom you require a grant to ‘save’. Over and over again. It’s one heck of a business model.

One such organisation is Space International. Space stands for ‘Survivors of Prostitution-Abuse Calling for Enlightenment’. Space was started by Rachael Moran. Rachel wrote a book called “Paid For’. (Of course she wrote a book, they all write a book, it is the building block on which every self respecting victim saviour stands tall…) Rachael tells us that she pounded the paved slabs of Wellington Lane in Dublin from early evening ‘until the small hours’ in search of a man who would pay to abuse her.

Strangely, there is a group of prostitutes who worked that patch of Wellington Lane – in fact the very corner that Rachael claimed to be on – and they never set eyes on her. They were so incensed by her claims that they took themselves off to a solicitor and swore an affidavit, a copy of which I have, which further refutes her claim to have been arrested for soliciting ‘before 1993’. An impossibility.

At no time did I ever see, or hear of “Rachel Moran” author of “Paid For” and founder of “Space International” nor anyone resembling her, working in that area. In her book she claims to have worked near the corner of Wellington Lane from early evening until “the small hours”, which would have placed her within 15 yards of me for several hours most nights.

I have asked several people I retain some contact with, or could locate, from that time and nobody else can remember her, or anyone like her, not only there but in any form of sex work indoor or outdoor, at any of the times she claims to have worked, between 1991 and 1998.

Beyond this, in her book “Paid For” and online blog “theprostitutionexperience” she has described several people, but not one of them even resembles anyone I ever met or heard of.

Perhaps Rachael, mouselike, was hiding in a dark corner, eh? Though I would say that managing to conceal yourself so well that not one of your fellow workers was aware of your presence would seem to be counterintuitive if you wish to advertise your services by being out on the street?

Never mind, Rachael has done well for herself; a book to flog, and grants to apply for, outrage at Amnesty to muster.

One thing puzzles me though. Amongst all this talk of ‘the patriarchy’, and imbalance of power, of how evil men force these women to trade their bodies for a meagre bowl of gruel for their children, and ‘give us more money to save ’em’ – there is never any mention of the ‘other role’ that men play in this charade.

Men are only ever mentioned as the ‘purchasers’ of sex (or the traffickers!). Who is going to save all the male prostitutes from these, er, evil men? There is little literature on male prostitution, and what there is paints a very different picture.

We have found that the majority of male prostitution is voluntary. Most of these sex workers are not dependent upon the money that they earn by performing sexual acts. Even those forced to work in illegal brothels began on a voluntary basis.

The John Jay study of children in the sex industry in New York discovered that an astounding 50% of the ‘trafficked children’ were in fact boys. Nobody mentions them.

It is estimated that of the 40 million prostitutes in the world, 8 million are thought to be men. In San Francisco, it was found that 25% of the prostitutes were transgendered – so I suppose everyone grabs them to bolster their statistics.

One survey of web sites advertising sexual services revealed that nearly half – 42pc – of all prostitutes in the UK (totalling 104,964) are in fact male. Professor Victor Minichiello has written an excellent book, Male Sex Work and Society – he looked at the situation in Ireland:

In terms of the regulation of sex work in Ireland, male sex work is rendered virtually invisible within political and policy discourses. This is reflected in recent government reviews and political debate about sex work in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, where the criminalisation of sex work and the purchase of sex services are favoured.

He says one of the misconceptions regarding male prostitutes is that it is an exclusively homosexual transaction:

“increasingly women are also seeing the male body as a commodity and as they have more income and power they purchase it if appropriate to them. It is no longer the case that men are only the buyers of sex; some sell it to others. It is a reality and governments need to recognise the changing face of the sex industry as a result of e-technology and broader acceptance of sexualities.”

The bias of the ‘rescue’ industry is towards the ‘weak and unwilling girls’, and relies on men being seen as predators. It has more to do with Feminist ideology than a desire to rescue either children or vulnerable women. You can’t be a predator and a victim – consequently they ignore 50% of those trafficked child victims in New York?

That same bias was shown a couple of weeks ago when the CPS issued its report of ‘Violence against Women and Children‘ which managed to tuck 17,000 abused men into a footnote at the bottom of page 19, hoping no one would notice that they comprised 16% of these battered ‘women and children’. Alison Saunders was forced (Oh probably by a man!) to come out with a garbled apology.

The women I have talked to, and specifically Irish women who have worked as prostitutes, yeah, on Wellington Lane – and there are people who remember them there! – may have been victimised by all sorts of things in their lives; poverty, the abuse of an over-powerful state, religion, useless parents, undoubtedly.

Quite why they should now be victimised by legislation preventing them as adults from working as they wish, in order to further the ambitions of feminist grant-grabbing ideology, defeats me.

Unexpectedly, I find myself cheering Amnesty International for having the courage to stand up to the bullying and coercion of these women.

If legislators are to concern themselves with the oldest profession, it might be an idea to aim their laws at trying to make it harder for organised crime to exploit it. Allowing prostitutes to form groups, rent premises, and work in a reasonably safe and secure environment under their own control without the need of ‘pimps’ for ‘protection’ might be a measure worth examining, though I’m sure it would have it’s flaws.

By coincidence, there was an article in yesterday’s Telegraph about an escort agency in London supplying women for women clients. It did seem to be a rather ‘high-end’ operation not quite comparable to streetwalking, but it did seem to reinforce Anna’s point that ‘prostitution’ is a broader business than men buying sex from women.

Interesting piece of artwork chosen to illustrate the article. Would the Landlady (possibly a tad mischieviously) be suggesting that the problems of prostitution are even broader in some parts of the world than others? Does it suggest a refusal to have the wool pulled over the snug’s eyes? Far be it from me to suggest that the Landlady might be trying to ram a point home, but are ewe trying to drop a subtle hint, perhaps? Has evidence come to light of agencies operating in a specialist niche; have traumatised victims come forward to tell all to the authorities, or are they just bleating?

The hegemony of victimhood in the culture wars is indeed an interesting and under-researched topic.

There was widespread rad-fem resentment, for instance, when the children’s homes historic abuse cases dominated the abuse agenda in the 90s and were overwhelmingly about male victimization. It wasn’t just the publicity, the fact that cases were institutional and subject to class action meant that alleged victims could a) apply for compo without ever having to give evidence in a criminal or civil trial b) receive substantial payouts in civil settlements over and above what might be available from the CICA in domestic cases. The women, most of whom were, or were alleged, domestic victims lost out not only because of the case by case basis of claim, but under something called the ‘same roof’ rule, might not have been eligible for compensation at all if it was domestic and had occurred prior to 1980.

Saunders is clearly on a mission to redress the balance, which is only fair, since the whole ideology was coined by the rad fems back in the 80s.

I don’t know the nature and the extent of the hidden plague of victimhood variously alluded to and nor does Saunders, or any one else – because it’s hidden.

What I do know is that none of this ever took off in a significant way before compensation became an incentive in the late 1980s – albeit that this was a collateral aim as expressed by the victims, and discounted entirely by the saviours.

The compensation wars attendant on the cultural variety have however, caused much grief – not least among the beneficiaries, whose suffering in this respect may well be ‘hidden’ through shame, or misappropriation.

Take, for instance, Darren Laverty – a North Wales survivor. Darren is both an accuser and an accused, falsely in some respects, but not it appears in others – namely a tendency, at the very least, to bully and berate. His blog and videos make interesting, though sometimes gnomic, reading, but anyone who has witnessed his garbled, rambling ‘driftwood’ rants as he wanders along the shoreline with his dog can see that this is a man of intelligence who, for whatever reason, has suffered, and continues to do so.

Darren is ‘Ryan Tanner’ in Richard Webster’s The Secret of Bryn Estyn. This is expressly confirmed by Darren himself.

He joined a crusade orchestrated by others, largely through ‘victim’ recruitment. The tragic consequences of this for some of his peers has resulted in significant , mutually destructive, inter or intra-‘victim wars’ played out mostly, but not exclusively, on the internet.

Darren now sees he was a pawn in a game, but cannot come to terms with the fact that the pawns make their own moves and indeed he has become a bit-player in the current scramble overseen by Operation Pallial- the collateral damage of which is yet to be realised.

* this is a man of intelligence who, for whatever reason, has suffered * There was a time they would write plays or poetry or perhaps compile dictionaries; do something useful. Those days are gone it seems.

“Minor’s condition deteriorated and in 1902, due to delusions that he was being abducted nightly from his rooms and conveyed to places as far away as Istanbul, and forced to commit sexual assaults on children, he cut off his own penis (autopeotomy), using a knife he had employed in his work on the dictionary.”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Chester_Minor

Darren did complete a degree in criminology – but his aspirations appear to have gone to dust – and other substances. Reminded of the the Spend! Spend! Spend! lady – whose windfall fortune disintegrated into a pile of ash. Course she only bought a lottery ticket – or was it the pools? There’s more baggage in the compo game.

It was a pools win, from Littlewoods. It was £152K – almost peanuts today but a huge sum in 1961, equivalent to several millions. And it was actually Keith Nicholson who won it, not Viv. However, Keith wasn’t a bubbly, blonde showoff who gave good headlines so he quickly got forgotten and died in a car crash four years later. By that time most of the cash had gone – but at least it had gone to local shopkeepers and publicans, instead of to some tax haven!

In fairness to Viv Nicholson (who died this year), she’d grown up living hand to mouth with only a few shillings left after payday, was married at 16 to Keith (not the brightest of people) and a fairly wretched life in a back to back in Castleford stretched ahead of her. Then suddenly wealth (and attention) beyond her wildest dreams with crowds of reporters waiting for her at Kings Cross and Bruce Forsythe presenting a giant cheque. After it all, she studied and wrote about her experiences as well as helping others.

And one good thing came out of it. The pools companies started (and the Lotto has today) an advisory panel to make sure that winners invest most of it. Not that they all take that advice, even now.

Back in pre-Lotto days, C4’s Cutting Edge did an programme on pools winners, which featured an interview with – IIRC – Littlewood’s chief advisor to the lucky few. He came across as the sort of overly avuncular boredyou’d do your best to avoid under normal circumstances, but he did mention that his chief piece of advice was that winners should be actively discouraged from pouring their now-found wealth into business ventures, especially those they had no prior experience of. In particular he said far too many wanted to buy and run pubs, because they’d only ever seen them from the customer’s side, and didn’t realise how much work they actually entailed. Of the actual winners featured in the programme, the most content seemed to be the guy who – at the time his numbers came up – was working as an odd job man at the local greyhound track. He subsequently bought the venue, and simply carried on doing what he had done before, happy as Larry.

@Bandini – your comment is a little gratuitous if I may say so, respectfully. You made no reference to what might be ‘wide of the mark’ given that there were a number of points made and illustrated. If there are demonstrable factual errors I’ll gladly correct them.

Oh crikey, I really did hesitate before writing that & really don’t want to get dragged into this, but… “… played out mostly, but not exclusively, on the internet…” No, certainly not exclusively, as harassing families with young children attests:

That is but a fraction of the what went on. The 12-month conditional discharge has recently ended – celebrated on Twitter with thinly-veiled threats to do serious harm to others. I’m only familiar with a small percentage of this, as an observer-from-afar fearing that it was all going to end really, REALLY badly.

“He joined a crusade orchestrated by others…” & “Darren now sees he was a pawn in a game…” are, I think, where you are wide of the mark. Can I leave it there (and hope that someone else pipes up)? I did say: “I THINK you MAY be…” so I was referring to interpretations of events rather than factual errors, and it really has become a mess of claim & counter-claim that I’d rather not involve myself in.

Thanks Bandini for clearing that up. I was aware of the court case, but I still think ‘mostly’ covers the field of recent history and I did say the wars were ‘significant’.

I would be interested in contrary views as to the interpretation highlighted, including by Darren himself.

Richard Webster makes some interesting observations about him with his characteristic generosity of spirit. Other people beg to differ – often based on personal experience . His videos are disturbing and frightening.

But all I was trying to do was inject some human understanding into an area clouded by stereotypes from both sides.

My understanding of it was that this story had been used against Laverty recently. That Laverty is an unreliable narrator cannot be gainsaid. He himself claimed to have ‘recovered memory’, re various incidents he witnessed or suffered.

But the victim wars include others with labile claims or memories. There are many shifting alliances and truth is not only a casualty of war but sometimes used, selectively, as a weapon.

Laverty has many enemies – going back a long way. His champion was Alison Taylor – who is not currently active on the internet as far as I know and never has been. She’s a novelist and former probation officer and social worker. Taylor helped many ex-care residents ‘recover memories’. She cares; but her memory was also strangely labile.

Laverty once said in newspaper article calling for victims that there were many who didn’t know they had been abused and that he himself was a ‘cabbage’ before he met Taylor (well I can’t remember whether he mentioned Taylor’s name directly but I think he would bear this out).

I suggested to him on Twitter that maybe he ought to go back to being a ‘cabbage’ to recover his true memories. But once you get caught up in this kind of stuff if comes back to haunt you, and you have to constantly justify conflicting statements – that’s the problem – recovering one’s true identity in space and time – memory.

You see, I think Darren, unlike some, genuinely wants to be good. He has a conscience – and it’s eating him – and others- away.

Laverty has produced a video which proves – he claims – that the story you mention, Margaret, was concocted with the help of illegal access to police statements (with an added libellous fabrication thrown in for good measure). The truth is very different, although his pal Jonathan Sawyer wouldn’t want anyone to know about THAT:http://oi62.tinypic.com/259h2qs.jpg

P.S. I saw you on Twitter… “Clare Jervis ‏@mscjervis Sep 19 England, United Kingdom In Oct 2012, a false claim was made about Lord McAlpine. Shortly after @tom_watson alleged a ‘VIP network’ cover-up. Cld they be related?”

It was the other way around, apparently:

“According to the Bureau, on 25 October Stickler was emailed by a “senior contact and old colleague at the BBC who referred to allegations Tom Watson MP had made about the Waterhouse inquiry in the House of Commons on the day before”.” That’d be Iain Overton, who swang immediately into action upon hearing Watson’s PMQs.

(Incredibly, it has been claimed that Chris Fay was involved in the Newsnight fiasco, arguing with the staff pre-transmission that they’d got the wrong man. The source of this nonsense? A Fay collaborator & Express stooge who spouts rubbish wherever he goes, with a particluar involvement in the fabled “minister in a mucky video” tale. To be seen hinting at things below-the-line of Exaro articles… probably one of their “top sources”!)

It used to be said of the one time Tuppeny Uprights on Waterloo Bridge that they could have trousers down, contract fulfilled and trousers up in five to ten minutes. This was of particular benefit to the many servicemen using Waterloo Station at the time. Not only that but many men would be given an added feature that enabled early dishonourable release. It was understood that they were not ladies to be trifled with.

In the same way that, trumpeting gender equality and the rights of homosexuals to demand ‘gay cakes’ wherever they be baked, while clarion for the rights of the RoP to carry on unmolested and in peaceful molestation and conquest of the west, the social justice warriors; Amnesty et al are conflicted. Selling sex, for the woman who has command of her body, “it’s my life” she screeched, is a lifestyle choice these days, is it not?

The other day in total solidarity, I cried a river for poor Miz Jessica Valenti, ““Men rarely catcall me any more” egad! the poor dear! Oh and ah, plus lack a day and Feminism is so old hat when a gal reaches ‘a certain age’ sob, sob. Rise up and CRY! God we want to be slaves again! and where’s Harry my house husband? Yes! Back to the barricades WOMEN! run out the old tales, of sex slaves and unequal pay and it will keep Feministas in books and luxury to which they is as is their girly right, to be accustomed.

In fact old hat and mink stole, girls on top and the fight got so equal, that they ran out of victimhood status indulgences, now there’s a thing.

How strange is it, this unrecognizable world and built by people who inhabit a parallel universe. Another world and one where; humanist equivocation and moral relativism, we’re all so equal but some more than others [wink, wink, nod, nod] and the culture of me, me, me but you can’t discipline the kids, oh and your country does not belong to you, it belongs to universal rights and….everyone who wants to live in your garden though caution should be advised, try setting up your gay toys and bric-a-brac shop in downtown Riyadh intoning your, “universal rights”.

A last reverie, on reading stories of children and teachers entwined, I often wonder and think back to when as a child-man of some 14 or 15 years of age and resisting and failing, fantasizing on a curvaceous, lissom and very attractive history teacher, that, if she made me her sex slave, what would I do about it and in those days, I recall the answer happened oft’.

Street prostitution may be still prevalent among women in Amsterdam, but it’s largely disappeared here. The call numbers in phone boxes of the 80s were superseded by the internet, just as the traditional brothel and pimps were overtaken by the self-employed, the saunas and the escort agencies.

Nor did female prostitutes in the old days necessarily spend day and night on street corners. Many were/are parents. Prostitution was a choice whereby they could and can choose their own hours to suit .

And that’s the major difference – mobility. The blokes tended to move from major city to major city. The women are rooted to home.

Maybe misconceptions are shaped by the cautionary tales of TV drama, particularly by those whose lives preclude them ever coming into contact with prostitution? A similar path follows with portrayals of recreational drug use, which is why some believe dropping the occasional E or smoking the occasional spliff will render the user a foaming-at-the mouth smackhead in a matter of months. If it happened to someone on ‘Eastenders’, that must be how it is…

An interesting inversion of the usual narrative – before he got stuck in his “Rich People Having Fabulous Parties” rut – is Stephen Poliakoff’s <i.Runners, in which James Fox searches mostly night-time London lookign for his 14 year old daughter (Kate Hardie), whic disappeared from their Nottingham home three years previously. He is all ready to save her from whatever ill he thionks must have befallen her – whether prostitution, drug-addiction, or cult indoctrination – and so then has difficulty handling the reality of finding her is a shabby but apparently benign south London houseshare, making a living of her own choice by street leafletting.

Don’t worry too much about it, A+TA. I tried hard to be ‘worldly wise’ for some years, before it gradually dawned on me that I wasn’t, and never would be. Nowadays, I just try to get on with my life as best I can, try to do no harm, try to help out family, friends and neighbours when I can, and let the rest of this mad world get on with it’s own business. From what you’ve said in previous threads, you’ve ‘done your bit’ for your fellow humans; nobody can do much more than that in life. Just enjoy the good bits. You’ve earned that much.

Anna; it’s often strange to me, when I read of and about all these awfully traumatised women that they so rarely represent the (few) prostitutes I’ve come across. The Balsall Heath women described by McLeod have the most credibility, because my old 1980’s social peer group knew the area quite well. Balsall Heath was the place that hit the headlines back then, but there have been places in many urban areas and even suburbs known to the cognoscenti, where, it is said; ‘all tastes are catered for’. I recall a high street escort agency in Wolverhampton, iconically called ‘Cyn & Joy’ (Just across from the Mander Centre) in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Very clean and respectable looking.

As for the women, being ‘on the game’ was a way of earning extra pin money for nice holidays for women with absent / stingy or even sexually distant menfolk. Mostly Golf or Grass ‘Widows’ who liked to scratch their itch for the extra cash it brought in. Some quite ‘well bred’ girls who went down to the Smoke, coming back with all sorts of ‘gifts’, and sometimes even a wealthy husband.

All of the above I have witnessed, known of socially or heard about from a first hand source. The sensationalised ‘victim – author’ whose stories are so beloved of the SJWs, Islingtonites and Daily Wail editorial team? Never. Funny that.

Brings to mind the old story of the good Catholic girl from Dublin who went to London, returning a few months later with fur coats, jewels and all the bling. When her mother asked how she got them, she told her, at which point her mother promptly collapsed into a faint. When the mother recovered, she asked her daughter, “Tell me again, how did you get those?”. So the daughter repeated it. “Thank the Good Lord for that,” exclaimed the mother, crossing herself vigorously, “I thought you said you’d become a Protestant”.

@bill. Think you may be over-egging it a bit. I lived in Balsall Heath (Cannon Hill – behind Edgbaston Cricket Ground – witnessed the Phoenix Ashes at firsthand from my bedroom window) in the early 80s being blissfully unaware of it’s ‘reputation’ when I moved there. So I’m not sure about the ‘headlines’.

There were lots of Asians living there – and it was their vigilantes in the 90s that put an end to the street trade. Funny that’s never mentioned in the exploitation lore.

The prostitutes did business at the end of the road and up a bit. You wouldn’t have known for the most part though there was one little street where women sat in windows. There was a coffee bar that was known for drug-dealing – the Karnakali and sometimes you’d see a couple of women chatting outside. This was by day. I didn’t monitor activity at night for the most part. But I do remember seeing one woman repeatedly who looked very ‘battle-scarred’ and one night I saw a woman get out of car and she limped along bendedly looking completely f*cked. Whether this was her usual demeanour I don’t know. But it was sad and moving. She may have been on drugs. It was said many workers didn’t live in the area – but I would guess some did – or nearby – hence the ‘nipping out’.

I remember being propositioned once by someone in a car in broad daylight. I was pushing a buggy with an infant in it at the time. I thought someone was trying to signal to me for directions, or seemed to know me. It was only after he drove off that the penny dropped. I remember seeing what seemed to be a pink tutu in the back. The mind boggles. But McLeod’s research does throw a light on this.

I don’t think it was ‘pin money’ for the most part – just a habitual way of life and earning a living – at least that was the position at the lower end of the market.

Incidentally I do think the mobility issue with the blokes may be one reason why there is a disproportionate number of ex ‘rent boys’ seizing the abuse agenda rather than women. Without the ties of home and family responsibilities, it’s all too easy to go on an exciting, but ultimately, self-destructive slide, though how prevalent this is, I don’t know.

Bloody hell, Margaret, you’re only a hop & a skip away from an Exaro firecracker with this! They love tales about tutus & toddlers – it wasn’t a Roller, was it? Slicked back hair? Or maybe a diamond-encrusted baton was tucked behind the toff’s ear?!? Give ’em a call!

Sandy red hair in a beige hatchback if my memory serves me right. If that helps. At first I thought I might have recognised him – but didn’t know from where – hence my willingness to smile nervously at his friendly gestures. I then went blank and he moved off. He looked like …sorry I’ve always been hopeless at recognising ‘names’.

I tried Balsall Heath one Christmas…88 or 89. It had been a bad year in Dublin and I had to spend Christmas in Birmingham. I didn’t see the harm in trying to make up the deficit and it was the only area I had ever heard of.

Oh the real name thing…since Stormont illegally published my name, address and telephone numbers for 10 months as punishment for sending them a sworn affidavit that didn’t suit them and to discourage any more of “that sort of thing” from other sex workers, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point in hiding anything. :o)

Besides I have a lovely cutmyway – er – letter opener to snuggle up to.

Apart from that, after the first 48 hours street sex work is just a job…I never met another sex worker who hated it as much as I did but it beat the hell out of starving…or selling my soul for the position of “survivor in chief” that was hinted my way in 2012.

How interesting @Gayle. Particularly liked the reference to ‘grooming’ in your blog and the paucity of punters. A must read. I’d left Brum by late 80s so can’t say if ‘business’ had declined noticeably at that time but it was never particularly noticeable.

It did disappear though with the vigilantes (there had been a previous community crackdown in Moseley in the mid-80s) – early 90s in BH I think. Prior to this the police seemed to have been pretty lax. Places like the Karnikale were useful reference points for finding out about anything serious going on – as with the Cannon Hill pub I would guess though that was always being raided until it was closed down and razed (the listed urinal on the street outside is still there – though not in use). As a resident I had no contact with this world at all, to my knowledge – though some women at the local playgroup may have.

There was a play room and a sitting area. the middle class women would stay in the playroom with the kids. The working class – all of whom were white with black boyfriends and had been in care at one time or other, would sit smoking in the sitting area berating their idiot menfolk on the phone ‘Look you black bastard…..’ Nevertheless they were fiercely loyal. There was a Friday community lunch when we’d all sit together.

The sitters had a pretty low opinion of us activity bound mums ruled by our kids’ ‘needs’ but we rubbed along OK. Actually we were often sitting chatting too in the play room. Although day to day lives were discussed, any professional services were never raised. For all I know the playroom women might have been at it. Or none at all.

I once read something about Balsall Heath and incoming workers – I got the impression that the main thoroughfare wasn’t BH at all but Broad St – centre/Edgbaston. the Hagley Rd had various sleaze joints and hotels. BH – none. I think it really may have been a local trade ‘nipping out to do a couple’.

It’s hard to support anything connected with Colm O’Gorman – and frankly I’m suspicious as to the impending ‘welfare’ ‘control mechanisms’ envisaged – but I will watch that space with interest.

I have got hives having Colm O’Gorman anywhere near my interests…hilariously his own “onein4” charity is frantically campaigning with the abolitionists and you should SEE the size of the flea I put in his ear a couple of years ago over that.

AND another one just now…the hives have been joined by a running nose and sneezes…these people…no…it’s no good…polite words refuse to come…

Even so ‘welfare’ and ‘control mechanisms’ are usually code for ‘buying off the NGOs and supplying minions to meet their control needs’ so if you want to float ‘Saving Fallen Women R US Inc ‘ NOW IS THE TIME to get in on the ground floor.

Actually Moor, in context “One in 4” refers to the number of people estimated (at least by O’Gorman) to have suffered sexual abuse…and thereby hangs a tale…

In 1994 the local abolitionists, Ruhama, always martyrs to global fad sociology at best, set out to prove that sex work is, in fact, caused entirely by sexual abuse and nothing whatsoever to DO with poverty, social mobility or…you know, that nasty, sordid money stuff.

They were THRILLED when they managed to prove this by establishing that something like One in 3 15/16 of sex workers, when asked (bit risky that, they usually prefer to just make something up without bothering them see the 2002 SAVI report and just LOOK where I found it http://www.oneinfour.ie/content/resources/savi.pdf ) admitted they had been sexually abused…

After O’Gorman came up with “One in 4” they went awfully quiet about sexual abuse causing sex work and began to insist sex work was caused ENTIRELY by men demanding paid sexual services and pimps abducting unwary women to provide them…

Never had any dealings with prostitution, so I’ve no first hand knowledge of the sticky realities. Some things do stick in my mind though. First the enterprising ladies I saw in the ’90’s using large transit size vans as ‘places of business’ up & down the French autoroute network. Next those sad women sat in the shop windows in the bar areas around the docks; was it Rotterdam? Last were the ladies* plying their trade along a highway in Spain on my route to work. Foreign car, they always waved every lunchtime as I went back for bocadilla & mini-siesta. One of them ate in a bar we used- just a nod of recognition, no more. *except one was reputedly a bloke. I did one day see him (?) leap out of a lorry cab & run down the road while pulling up pants. All seems very sad to me.

Sad? Yes, I’d agree. But some people just do what they have to do to survive. I can see no point in legislating to make their lives even harder without giving them a better alternative. Some do very well out of it; a Liverpool copper of my acquaintance once regaled me with stories of the thousand-pound-a-night-and-anything-goes ‘escort’ he encountered during his duties. I rather had the impression that he’d have quite liked to ‘have a go’ himself – she was quite a looker, he reckoned. A few years of that and some canny investing, and a woman could set herself up for the rest of her life. Mind you, that’s not necessarily typical.

More memories. In a past life as a Work Study man in the mid-1970s, I found myself accompanying a workman one morning walking through the streets of Chapeltown, the red-light district of Leeds. A number of the local professional ladies were chatting on the doorsteps, not really expecting much passing-trade at that time of day. As we passed one doorway, one of the girls called across to us, “Come on in, boys, only 50p”. Quick as a flash, the workman called back, “Show me the 50p first. love.” Cue: a very hasty retreat from the area, pursued by many colourful oaths. Happy days (especially at only 50p).

They’re all the daughters of someone, but they’re also part of normal life everywhere if you know where to look. It’s not compulsory to trade with them and, back then, I got the impression they were quite comfortable with their lot, no signs of abuse, just using their skills and resources to earn a crust like the rest of us, even if their legal crust was in the tax-free black economy. I don’t judge, merely observe.

I agree I’d be horrified if my daughter entered the trade/profession, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand the rationale – just think it’s going the extra mile. As so many do in lots of respects other than sex.

That would still be the case today and all abolitionism does is take that last resort of the table for those who need it. I have never seen any abolitionist offer any real solution to the problems that do drive women into sex work, just a lot of overpaid lip service, and worse, “services” that only disempower, impose control and indoctrinate in looney religious and/or personality cults that add up to massed gaslighting…

So if you need the money badly enough you get your head down and get on with it, cos the cavalry ain’t coming…

THAT explains it…now you mention it I can see how a person could mix up Wellington Lane and *THAT SHOT* of the (then) perpetually locked and suitably overgrown gate that I turned my ankle scrambling over to escape for good and did not really need to be reminded of quite often…

Spare a thought for me in 2012 trying to keep a head (addled at best) on track with fake survivors and moral panic coming at me in stereo!

I was actually trying to write a serious, literate autobiography (partly for my Granddaughter and party as a document of social history that a dozen or so people might find interesting, certainly not to any agenda…I banished a former friend for good for insisting I should write it as a “Happy Hooker” tale and the local abolitionists for trying to seduce me into writing it as a “Prostituted Survivor” memoir and be their pet survivor…I sold sex for 6 years…I am 57, and autobiography is supposed to be about *ALL* of that). Anyway, I was writing it the old fashioned, 600 page way, and about 6 weeks away from Duncroft in spring 2012 when I did a bit of googling and came across Karin Ward’s memoir.

I scanned it (skipping the personal bits teen angst isn’t as interesting as it might be at my age) looking for material details and background to pad out my own failing memory (there was plenty, and those bits seem accurate) and give a slightly different perspective.

At some point, around the same time, someone related to the local magdalene laundry/fallen women rescue appeared calling themself “FreeIrishWoman” and rewriting sex work to agenda. I didn’t pay much attention at first, sex workers memoirs and facts never seem to be best friends (honesty and objectivity can never find a publisher) and annoy me reliably…

However, as 2012 got older she started getting specific and creeping closer and closer to places and people I knew and even further from the truth…that’s ok…never argue with a really good excuse to buy Bushmills when you have one in your hand…

I had to sit up and pay a bit more attention to it all when some idiot insisted on waving around a vignette from Duncroft called “A Swallow Falls Softly” that I had given to “Careleavers Reunited” to use as they pleased, with MY WHOLE NAME UPON IT…

…now, under normal circumstances, proper attribution is a GOOD AND POSITIVE THING…let us not attempt to deny that…bu not when it is a section of an old memoir you have already sent to the local abolitionists AND “FreeIrishwoman” in an early attempt at reason, under an alias.

The person who was waving the vignette around became, for some reason, highly affronted when I asked her to STOP attributing it by name…so that both situations suddenly had MY FULL ATTENTION…and I couldn’t help noticing the possibility of the sex work and Duncroft issues blowing sky high on a global scale…and my real name along with them.

But of course that was just being neurotic and melodramatising the situation…so I poured another glass of Bushmills and settled down to watch a silly “fly on the wall” (pun not intended, honestly) documentary about funeral parlours that promised to be light (if ghoulish) relief. It was too…right up until the end credits rolled, the announce next weeks documentary and flashed “THAT GATE PICTURE”.

Dunno – ask Sally Stevens – she had a bit of run in with fake ID impersonators from Duncroft on Amazon. Can never tell with these MPD types – sometimes their ‘alters’ go awol without the ‘host’s’ knowledge and do wicked things. They might have been on the Bushmills too though at the time.

* We have found that the majority of male prostitution is voluntary. *

Wouldn’t that be necessarily so? A female can have the option to just lie back and think of the readies, but a man has no such option. He has to take an interest at some level. I recall Fellini’s Casanova movie had Donald Sutherland having a pulchritudinous confederate in view as he serviced his powdered professional paramours, but that hardly seems an option in our more sparsely furnished centuries.

If I recall rightly, when Amnesty started it was designed to bring attention to people who were imprisoned for their opinions/views and had not commited any other crime. I thought at this time it was admirable and supported it wholly. However ot seems to have evolved into an all purpose lefty protest outfit and should be ignored.

In a world full of anonymous voices calling for full decriminalisation and real human rights for sex workers I thought you might like a face to go with the name (address and phone number unlawfully provided by Stormont) however poor the quality

The Militant wing of the “We-Know-Best” Cultural Marxists never intended to stop their corrosive campaigning until they had undermined the foundations of civilized society. Unfortunately for them the broad movement inevitably fragmented and are now starting to attack each other. This can only be good for democracy, free speech etc. In order to understand what is going on we have to analyze the bizarre interactions in the hierarchy of politically correct worthiness.

My studies lead me to believe that top of the victimhood league this week are transexuals, followed by bearded queens in bridal gowns, gay amputees, black Irish one legged dwarf single parents, asylum seekers, victims of Ted heath/Jimmy Savile/Greville Janner, Muslim hate Preachers and Australian cricketers, with wimmyn and blacks languisjing at the bottom of the table